Thousands of couples marry each year and many of them, after a short period, end up separating. Can you tell if a couple will be happy and their marriage will last before they get married? A North American investigation has just verified that the subconscious of the spouses can be an indicator of the success or failure of a marriage.
To study the subconscious of couples James K. McNulty, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and his colleagues selected 135 newly married heterosexual couples and analyzed their behavior and what they thought about their partner every six months for four years. On the one hand, they proposed to consciously and slowly analyze their marriage with opposite pairs of adjectives: good or bad, satisfied or dissatisfied, and so on. However, to get an unconscious and visceral reaction, the researchers showed them images of their spouse for a third of a second followed by positive or negative adjectives, such as “horrible”, “impressive”, “excellent”, etc. having to press a key quickly to indicate whether the displayed word was positive or negative. In addition, the researchers controlled the reaction rate of the subjects.
Indicating that a word like “awesome” is positive is an easy task. However, showing a photo of the couple makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude towards the spouse. ” People who have very positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like ‘amazing’ are positive words and very slow to indicate that words like ‘horrible’ are negative words,” explains McNulty.
On a psychological level, the explanation is simple. According to McNulty, “everyone wants to believe they have a good relationship and people can convince themselves they do, but gut reactions are more indicative of how people intuitively feel their relationships are.”
The research has been published in the specialized journal Journal Science and, as McNulty himself points out, “if they can feel what their instincts tell them they will see that there is a problem and then they could benefit from exploring that, perhaps even with a marriage counselor. professional”.
